bootcamp/XP will only install on internal mac mini drive

[glennarbor]

So I have my osx booting from an external fw 7200 drive. I went to install boot camp/xp last night and it requires to be installed booting from the internal drive, which i have no osx on, thus no booting. I'm considering cloning the osx from the external to the internal so I can then install xp, but once that's done I'd like to trash osx from the internal and just leave it on the external.
Does anybody know if this will work? Or maybe a work around to installing bootcamp/xp while booting from an external drive ?
Thanks!

[skoone]

I ran upon the same problem.. I too use an external firewire drive for OS X, and was disappointed that, even though I had spare space on the internal drive, boot camp refused to even deal with it. I ventured out like you're thinking of, to move everything back over to the internal drive. I used SuperDuper, and everything worked out fine, it just takes time to do all that. Once I went back to booting off of the internal drive, boot camp let me repartition on the fly, and Win XP installed nicely! It works very well, by the way. After I did the Win XP installation, I then proceeded to go back to my external firewire drive. Yes, it boots fine into OS X from the FW drive as well as Win XP on the internal drive. The only minor issue you have then is that bootable OS X partition on your internal drive that you can't do anything else with. Perhaps there is some sort of 3rd party partitioning software that will let you manipulate the internal drive's partition scheme. I'm personally not bothering with it because I just wanted to try it out for myself. I already have a PC that I use, so no need for Windows on my Mac.

Win XP to my knowledge will not boot off of an external drive. That's why Apple likely made boot camp so picky about making absolutely sure that you're working strictly off of the internal drive in the Mini. I could be wrong about this, but it seems a while back when external USB and Firewire enclosures began popping up on the scene, a lot of folks wanted to have multi-boot setups of Win98/Win2k/Win XP and so forth, each OS being on their own separate USB or FW external drive. Nope, didn't happen because Windows wants to boot off of only the primary master drive or something to that effect. Win gurus can answer it better than I can for the reasons why, if it even matters. I think some people got Windows to work on separate drives but I suspect it was quite a chore!

I'll hush now....

Regards,
Steve

[SStreet]

You can thank Windows for using BIOS routines to boot, just like DOS for the last 20+ years.

Windows (and NTLDR) depend on BIOS Int 13 to read the disk to load the kernel and modules to start.

Mac OS X Intel uses EFI, which, has lots more support for "non-standard BIOS" devices. (ie Firewire or USB HDDs)

But alas -- Vista just "might" support EFI... who knows... by the time Microsoft gets finished taking out the software features that contain to many bugs to finally meet the release date in 2007, it may not support anything newer then WinXP...

MS Vista -- aka MS WinXP SP3
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